The Fourth Wall in the Room
by Oroburos69
Summary: The Joker sees more than he should.
1. The Fourth Wall in the Room

**Title: **The Fourth Wall in the Room

**Beta: **Lady of Scarlet

**Rating: **PG-13?

**Summary: **The Joker sees more than he should.

**Disclaimer: **I have no claim over these characters or the world, and I am making no profit.

It's a cool dry night in Gotham's autumn, when the Joker wins the day. The Bat lays broken, limbs askew, and the Joker kneels to play. The Joker pries and the Joker twists, skin and flesh and broken bones, but no matter how the Joker tries, Bats does not stir, Bats does not twitch, Bats does not cry.

The Joker sighs and looks to the sky, thick with smog and smoke. He frowns, he hems, he haws. Decision made, he leaps to his feet, and pulls Bats into a car. It is not his, but nothing is, so the taking is of little issue. From each according to ability, to each according to need.

The park remains a bloodstained field, a _bat _for the _Bat_ left carelessly on wet grass.

Batsman stains the backseat black, dripping blood from the vents in his suit, a limp sack of bones held together by leather, drip dripping on the grey colored fabric.

The Joker drives down the center, blaring horns and swerving cars to mark his passage. The crunch of metal and the scream of brakes makes his contorted grin real, a twist of _stop_ red lips over too big teeth.

In Gotham East lies a series of cracked open houses, deserted in the grand old quake, ignored by the returning crowds. The Joker likes it here, next to the sewage-scented sea. The screaming masses are long far gone, and he is away, alone, and free.

The Joker hums _Here Comes the Bride_ as he carries Bats over the threshold. He knocks the cowl against the door, and bends back the broken leg. Blood falls on the dull grey carpet, lonely drops soon joined by more.

Clean is _clean_, and close to god, so the Joker cleans Batsy clear of dirt. He wipes at the blood, but much more drizzles out, warm little rivers that stain the floor. The Joker sighs, gives it up, and puts the Lysol away.

He lifts Battykins, soft and malleable, a vessel leaking its contents onto the kitchen floor. A moldering couch sits all alone in an empty room, and the Joker lies upon it, the Bat draped over him, a warm weight of wheezing breath and drip _dripping _blood. The cape gets in the way, a tangled mass of rags around his legs, so long white fingers clawing it free from the Bat's casing.

Bat's head is pressed against his vulnerable neck, and it is surrender that fills the Joker's mind. A _breathing_ body lies across his own, and fractured things that might be memories sing from the broken windows. Too long arms wrap around Bats.

The Joker closes his eyes and dreams. It's okay, you can rest, _I am here._

(We are real.)

When he wakes, Batman is lucid, his blank white eyes glaring from inches away. His growled threats are weak as the Joker eases out from under him. He is gentle—_gentle, you don't want to hurt him—_but Bats' mouth pulls tight from pain. Something twinges in the Joker's belly, and he doesn't like it very much.

He rises to his _too big _feet, and paces the rotting, carpet floor. It creaks under his weight, screams of anger against his activity, and the Joker stomps in childish protest.

_The Bat hurts. _

He presses fingers into his bruises, remembering being hit, being hurt, in all the worlds before this one.

_Pain ends when the doctors find you. They tie you up, poke you with needles, and everything stops. When you wake up, the world is as it was the last time you woke up. Bats is better, you are better, the pain is gone_. _Everything is forgotten_.

The Joker's breath hesitates. Ropes and needles make you better. He drops to his bony knees, and crawls to his broken Bat. The Batty one twitches, struggling against broken bones to move, and the Joker stops.

He has no ropes, and he has no needles. He cannot make him well.

"What happens when it's you instead of me?" the Joker whispers, inches away from the Batman's face. He peers into the flat white eyes, wondering if there are real, human eyes under them, or if the matte black face is the real skin, the true being.

The Bat hardly breathes as he replies, "What do you mean?"

"How does the world reset?" The Joker is suddenly desperate to know what they did when it was Bats lying broken on the floor.

"You aren't making any sense," Bats tells him, his voice wary, possibly placating.

The Joker collapses, limbs suddenly weak, in astonishment, in raging disappointment. "You _know_. You remember. There's no way that you don't know!"

The Bat looks at him, the cowl as blank as ever, the bruised and swollen lips slightly parted. He really, truly doesn't know.

Joker snarls, and asks the question that had given him the clue he needed to see through the veil of poorly faked reality. "How old are you?"

The Bat frowns. "I—It's none of your business."

"Fine. But keep that number in mind. Now answer this. _When were you born?_" Fear curls in Joker's chest, and he wonders if he really is crazy, if all the little clues and all the little impossibilities are just dreams from misfiring neurons.

The thin slice of skin around the Bat's mouth pales, and crushing relief swallows the Joker. He shudders, wiping at his _too thin _lips, skin catching on his _too big _teeth. "And the final world breaking question. What year is it?"

"It's impossible. What did you drug me with?" The Bat takes refuge in his lonely tower of denial, refusing to see the truth.

The Joker growls. "I haven't drugged you." His voice grows cold, and he knows that he's sounding _too sane_, but he ignores it, desperate relieve the loneliness. He grabs the Bats' shoulder and grips the broken bones he put there. "If you were drugged, that wouldn't hurt so much," he said over the whine of pain that slips from unwilling lips.

"When did I kill your little Robin?" he asks excitedly, reveling in telling someone, anyone, even if it is his only enemy. "Why hasn't anyone killed me?"

"I don't know—it would be wrong to kill you." Bat-Bat sounds bewildered, bemused, in pain. Joker wishes again for the healing powers of needles and ropes, because pain makes it harder to _see_.

"I've killed thousands. I'm the most prolific mass murderer of all time, Bats." The Joker feels the twisting world, his mind over-sensitized to the rapid scratch of some god's pen. "And you're the only one who remembers me from month to month, who remembers what I've done. The doctors _forget_ my crimes, even as they lock me away for them. _It doesn't make sense_."

"It can't—some form of treatment—it's impossible."

"I'm glad we agree." Joker rocks slightly, resisting the changes they try to pull, and the pressure eases slightly. "It's you and me, so far as I can tell. We can't die. I've tried killing you a thousand times, tried killing myself at least a dozen—we don't die. I've been testing—to see who comes back—here's a hint, don't worry about your Robins, they _always_ come back—Bats, listen, it's happening again."

"What? What's happening?" Bats sounds worried, as well he should. The Joker won't feel like himself, if this is himself, for much longer.

"It's going to change. They're rewriting us. It's going to—" The Joker's hair grows out by at least three inches, and he can see the Bat's startled jerk. "—We're going to forget for a while," he whispers, squinting against the pain.

"Will we remember?" Batman asks, levering himself up on a formerly broken arm.

"Maybe."

The roof cracks open, sparkling sunlight dazzling the inside walls. Superman dives in, heroically to the rescue, and the Joker _beams _with delight.

"Welcome to the super happy fun hour!" he cackles, rising to his feet, a detonator for a bomb suddenly in his hand.

Batman blinks as if confused, before rising to his feet.

"We're rigged to blow, boys and girls!" the Joker laughs, dancing across the creaking boards.

Somewhere, someone speaks, sounding faintly disturbed.

"Let's retcon that."


	2. The Dimension Where We Live

**Title: **The Dimension Where We Live

**Beta: **Lady of Scarlet

**Rating: **PG

**Summary:** To live, perchance to know, ay, there's the rub. For in that knowledge, what meaning comes?

**Disclaimer:** I have no association with DC comics, make no profit, and I paraphrased the summary from Hamlet

He wakes to pointless luxury.

He stands, shaking off the hidden aches of infinite injuries, drawn to the clock struck twelve. Ten: forty-seven, combination lock hidden in the gears, releases the hidden passage.

Reset the time, enter, become.

_Batman _stands, shoulders twitching, armor sliding into place.

The Joker is free, escaped again from old Arkham. The bright yellow symbol cuts clean (impossible) lines from the smog.

Drive in from the mansion on the hill, survey the city. No fires tonight. Park in a warehouse, five locks on the door. Escape to the roof and run toward the only light in the sky.

The commissioner waits, hands tucked in the pockets of his long beige coat. Words: Joker, free, factories in the North.

Disappear as soon as he looks away, run north and find—

The factory district is filled with ugly brick buildings, most of them crumbled and fractured, never repaired after the Cataclysm. Their windows are broken, wind whistling through them. Once, this was a place of production and industry, poorly paid jobs for vaguely legal workers. Now it is weathered and empty.

Gotham no longer produces. Cataclysm drove company after company away, leaving an empty hole where industry used to be. The tight environmental laws pushed through by Wayne Co. discourage investment, and the city languishes, half filled, mostly unemployed. Gotham is a middle man, a port of call, an importer, an exporter, a dock and little more.

The streets are empty, flat grey plains bordered by equally grey buildings. Batman creeps along the rotting roofs, listening for sounds of life inside the abandoned walls. There are no sounds of life, only the jolting sway and creak of unstable architecture under his boots.

They see each other at the same time, the Joker sitting on the edge of the roof, smiling, still smiling.

"Do you remember?" Joker asks, smile falling away but his teeth still bared. He doesn't have enough flesh to cover them.

Batman thinks _maybe_ and doesn't know why. He charges to engage in the fight.

"No?" the Joker questions mournfully, smile still gone, his face skull-like from the lack. "What to do, what to do…?" he murmurs, dodging away from each blow a second before it lands.

"Oh Bats," Joker says, and it's a curse in his mouth. "Why is it that you cannot catch me?" He darts away from a punch, limbs flying uselessly in the air. "I am not a fighter, and yet you don't even touch me. Why, Bats, why?"

Batman slows, confused, before beginning again, kicking at the man who is no longer there.

The Joker sighs, and shakes his hand, a length of pipe sliding out of his sleeve and into his palm. "I hoped, you know."

"Hoped what?" Batman asked, the niggling sense of 'not right' growing. He dodged back, putting distance between himself and the Joker.

"That you would remember." The pipe spins between his fingers, and Batman doesn't understand because it is not a threat, or a joke, or even spoken with the Joker's usual violent joy.

"Remember _what_?" he asks anyway, watching the pipe spin.

"How old you are. How long we've been doing this song and dance." The Joker shrugs, his thin shoulder rising under a bright purple jacket.

Batman pauses, memory battling at the corners of his mind. He remembers—decades.

"Ah!" Joker crows, his gaping smile returning. "You are remembering again!"

"It's impossible," Batman denies, déjà vu slithering though him.

The Joker laughs. "Oh no, I'll show you impossible." He pushes the pipe up his sleeve, and heads across the roof to the access building at the top. The metal door opens to shadowed stairs, and the Joker walks in. "Come on," he says.

Batman follows, his hands tied by the knowledge that he _has _forgotten something. Something important. The stairs lead to a door, strangely featureless. His eyes slide away from it and land on the Joker, and he nearly punches him before remembering.

The Joker's smile looks almost sane. He grabs for the door handle, but there isn't one, even though there had been. The Joker smirks and pulls a crowbar from the same sleeve he'd gotten the pipe from.

Batman comes close to hitting him then, remembering Jason. But Jason had come back. The memory twinges oddly, and he withholds judgment for the sake of demi-present intuition.

Joker pulls the pins from the hinges, and topples the door toward them.

Behind it lies a bright room, the edges sketched in with pencil lines. Batman pauses, staring at the unrelieved white. There are no shadows, no light sources. He steps back, and realizes that the room shines no light into the shadowed hallway.

"When I came in," the Joker said, walking on to the outlined walkway, "There was nothing behind the door. The walls were plain white, no corners, no floor, no ceiling."

"What is this?" Batman asks, following the Joker at an uneasy distance, his boots making no noise on the white floor.

"It's being drawn," the Joker replied. He sits on the edge of the rail, thumbs hooked over the parallel lines. Batman can see his hands though the gap. The Joker sits on nothing.

"Who's drawing it?" Batman questions, thinking of a new enemy, knowing it's not.

"I don't know," the Joker says. He sounds far too solemn. "I've found places like this before—not often, but lots more after the quake." Joker smirks for a second. "Come in further," he invites.

Batman steps forward, clearing the threshold. The lines stay the same, not adjusting to his change in perspective, and the effect is nauseating. Another step, then another, and the lines disappear, replaced by ones that fit his new position. "Did you drug me?" he asks, unable to explain it in any other way.

"Will you stop asking that?" the Joker says in exasperation, sounding normal, unlike himself. More like—

Batman's eyes widen as he remembers a rotting house down by the sewage treatment plant. "You—last time—"

"You've remembered?" the Joker asks hopefully.

"Yes. Why did I forget?" Batman realizes that his growl is gone, replaced by Bruce Wayne's voice. It's eerie in the echoless room.

"Everyone does, to some degree." Joker pauses, and smiles. "You less than anyone else I've met, if that's any consolation."

"Not particularly," Batman answers, jolted by the sound of his voice. He shouldn't speak—he doesn't speak with the mask on.

The Joker sways peacefully on the rail. "Touch the walls," he suggests.

They feel like fine paper. Pulling back, his hand moves in short, rapid jerks, as if it's under a strobe light. A soft scratching noise reaches his ears, and he glances over, seeing bricks being drawn onto the walls.

"Strange, isn't it?"

Batman reaches toward the rail that the Joker sits on, fingers being stopped by an invisible force. It's flat, not curved as he expected, and he glances toward the Joker, looking for an explanation.

"Everything here is flat, in line with where you are." The Joker raises his hand and holds it out to Batman. "I'm not sure about us, though."

Batman reaches out, touching the Joker's hand. It has the same texture as the wall, and as he runs his fingers up, he realizes that there is no depth to the Joker, despite the illusion of perspective. It's like touching a cardboard cutout. The Joker pushes his hand forward, but Batman feels no corresponding movement under his hand.

"That feels—odd," the Joker comments, smile dropped from his face.

"It looks odd," Batman agrees, frowning. "What is this?"

"It can't be explained." The Joker jumps off the rail and lands on the ground. It crinkles. "It's not—real. Nothing is. If you remember, and you try, you can feel the paper when you touch other things, things that look real."

Broad splashes of color begin to cover the walls, dark reds and browns.

Joker stretches out, yawning. "Soon this place will be done. It'll look real when you come back." He hesitates, "We'll probably forget as soon as it's finished. It's a lot easier to think clearly without the shadows."

"And then what?"

"Then we fight. We always fight." Joker heads down the stairs to poke at the newly colored walls, his movements as stuttered as Batman's had been after he touched the wall. He laughs, and looks up. "Sometimes, if you look, you can see writing next to things that are making noise. Sound effects."

Joker opens the door to the outside, and a burst of air swirls around the forming interior. The door squeaks, and for a second Batman sees the word _CREAK_ next to the hinges.

"Outside, you'll feel more real," the Joker promised, his trademark smirk falling into place, "But your actions here are more your own." He leaves, closing the door behind him.

Batman stays, fingers holding on to the invisible flat rail until wet color turns it gun metal grey. The warehouse is complete.

Batman rushes out the door, irritated that the Joker has managed to get away again.

The night outside is darker than the city lights should allow. Refraction and reflection ignored, the continuous nimbostratus smog shows sharp edged lines of light from the spotlight welded to the roof of the police station. To the clouds, there are no lights but this.

Harsh black outlines contour every shape, the world made into ink. Jagged yellow script writes out the sound of the Joker's dwindling laughter.

_It isn't real._


	3. To Suspend Disbelief

**Title:** To Suspend Disbelief

**Beta:** Lady of Scarlet

**Rating: **PG-13

**Summary:** The Joker is at large, Batman close behind him. Poison Ivy dies.

It rains in Gotham, pitter patter in the lonely night, water falling uselessly on dead pavement, draining into the hollowed underground. Crumpled side roads lay unrepaired, asphalt stabbing at the sky. Rain gurgles through their cracks.

The Joker walks alone, unhurried, without purpose. Tonight he is not plagued by the mad plans that spark-crackle inside his head, the white room having simplified him, reduced him, reproduced him as someone else. It's peaceful, while it lasts.

When the sense of gravity intrudes, Joker hardly notices, he is so used to the absence of freewill. The gentle tug on his limbs pulls him south, a fish hook through his lip dragging him toward the black hole of _plot_, because this is a story—that much he knows.

There's a garden in the city. Only one, the others withered and neglected for the lack of time, the lack of money, and the lack of desire. The geas drives him forward to the garden's hedge of thorns, parts of himself melting away, sinking into the cracks with the rain with every step he takes.

At its edge, green strands of wet grass bow down under rain drops, and a force outside of himself prompts the Joker to remove his shoes. He resists, for a second, for a moment, trying to prove he can (he can't). Something sparks under the tightly pulled strings of god, and the shiny black shoes are carelessly tossed away. The Joker resents it bitterly, his diminishment to a shoeless, penitent worshiper.

Words whisper from behind him, scripting above him. _This is Ivy's church_.

He walks barefoot into the grass, coat tearing on impressive thorns. His skin catches and rips on their points, blood dripping down to the tips of his fingers, feeding the plants below. As the blood falls, waves of dizziness pass through the Joker, out of proportion with the loss of blood.

He reaches the other side of the hedge, swaying slightly as he weaves through plants. Something cool and clear pours from the gaping hole in his mind where reality peers in, and the gaps and crevasses fill.

The Joker returns.

His eyes grow manically bright, gleaming radioactive green, as his skin deadens from corpse to marble in shade. Half sung words babble cheerfully from his lips as his feet lift into a shuffling dance.

"Poison, poison," he croons, spinning aimlessly, "Where are you at, sweet Poison?"

Vines rustle behind him, and the Joker laughs, twisting to face them. "Hello, my sweet." Madness courses through him, powerful, strong, absolute. He is untouchable, and perfect.

The vines wrap around his arms, soaking up the last of the blood, leaves lapping at his exposed flesh, drinking him in. The Joker grins, skin creasing under the strain of his smile. "Pretty Ivy," he says, voice growing sharper, threatening. "I've come to speak with you."

She steps from the shelter of a looming oak tree, green dryad in the dark of night. "What do you want?" Poison Ivy asks, and he laughs.

"To prove a point." The Joker answers, gripping the thick, healthy flesh of the vines holding him prisoner and tearing it apart. They bleed over his hands, vital fluids pouring on his dead skin, and he cackles, strange joy ringing through him.

Poison Ivy screams in pain and rage, and charges toward him, the ground itself rumbling as plants tear through damp earth, rising pale and whip-like from the ground.

The Joker never stops laughing, yanking a switchblade from his sleeve and slicing everything that comes near him. The vines pull back as she runs closer, tears or maybe rain streaming down her face.

He _cuts_ her. Bleeds the sap from her body, thick and sticky on his hands. It's far from human, and he giggles fitfully as he plays with it, kneeling over her body as vines lash at his back. She struggles weakly as he paws through her alien anatomy, searching for…he doesn't know what. (Her veins feel like roots, and isn't that _neat?_)

Eventually her twisting and writhing stops, and she lies mostly still under him. The vines stop whipping him. It's better this way.

The park rustles under the falling rain, and droplets fill her open eyes. A cold wind blows, and the Joker looks up, anticipating the blow. It knocks him back, and his chest seizes with laughter, uncomfortable-painful spasms that wrack his body.

"What are you _doing_?" Bats asks, sounding surprisingly appalled, because shouldn't he _know _by now?

The Joker glances at Ivy's twitching body. The answer seems quite obvious, so it's with no small amount of curiosity that he replies. "Killing her?" Thin, wheezing giggles punctuate his question, and his smile is beginning to ache at the corners, lips tight, tight, _tight _across his teeth_._

"_Why_?" the Bat pleads, and it sounds so very strange from his lips.

"Why not?" the Joker replies, licking a stray drop of sap-blood from his bottom lip. Poison Ivy is sweet, minty. The Joker's head tilts to the side as he stares at her remains, wondering if her flesh tastes the same.

"Don't you remember?" Batty-bat-bat stands back, unmoving after that first punch, staring at him intently. Rain drips from his fright mask, or maybe the mask is his face. The Joker has seen stranger things in Gotham, though he'll be damned if he remembers them.

The trees sound like they're crying, rain dripping from their leaves, and the taste of Poison Ivy's blood swells on his tongue. Perhaps she's poison. He laughs.

Joker smiles some more, thoughts running in blissful little circles, tiny birds chasing each other. It's nice. Circular. "Remember what, Bat-friend?"

The bat-cape flutters in the wind, and something presses down on the Joker's mind, monolithic, oppressive. He resists, knowing that he doesn't want it, and his nice and circular thoughts spin frantically, trying to escape.

The birds scream and light on fire.

Poison Ivy walks out of the trees.

All he can taste is ink.


End file.
